You’ve probably heard every cliche in the book about needing to take control of your own life, whether by seizing the moment or treating every day like it’s your last. If you’re lucky, you’ve managed to avoid the corniest of the corny, such as the quote pictured to the right. Personally, being bombarded by these quotes has caused them to lose their meaning over time, which is unfortunate because I think the message is crucially important.
It’s easy to fall into the trap of monotony, especially when work piles up and life becomes stressful. We can plod along through our days, doing the bare minimum required to fulfill our obligations, while complaining about the mundaneness of life. While this may work in the short run, and perhaps even be necessary during particularly stressful times, problems arise when we let this become a long-term habit. Because ultimately, we are letting go of the wheel, and hoping life takes us in a desirable direction. As a senior, I think I fell victim to becoming a passenger on my own life’s journey, and it led me to the most important takeaway from my senior year: change is not passive.
To my surprise, no magic switch flipped the moment I became a senior, or when the clock struck midnight on my 18th birthday. I’ve learned a lot about myself and I certainly have more experience under my belt, but I don’t feel vastly different now than I did six months ago. I had always pictured senior year as a defining moment, a time for people to truly flesh themselves out and find their place. In hindsight my perception of senior year was naive. Why would I be a completely different person? Save for a change in grade, what has truly changed about me?
I once thought that experiences alone could change us. In the past few months, I’ve been exposed to experiences that have been unique to my senior year— for example, the college application process— but my initial belief was oversimplifying the process. Experiences are certainly a catalyst for change, but the responsibility still lies with us to take advantage of that catalyst. New experiences are great facilitators of change, but the experience is only half the battle. The other half lies with us, as it’s our job to take advantage of the opportunity to grow. In the past few months, I’ve tried to say yes more. Saying yes, broadening our horizons, has been beneficial for me for the doors it has opened, but something was missing in my thought process. I thought that simply saying yes was enough. That somehow, maybe through osmosis, these experiences would transform me. But I was still the same person, just in a new environment.
Now, I’m not saying that everything in life needs to be a point of growth, and we aren’t allowed to kick back and be ourselves. But if our goal is to grow, we must be the harbingers of that growth. I think the title given to senior year as a “defining year” is misunderstood. Or at the very least, it was misunderstood by me. While I took it as a sign that senior year would help define me, in reality, it’s an opportunity for us to define ourselves.
As new doors in my life have opened over the past few months, I’ve realized that I want to be better. I want to grow as a person, for myself, and for the people around me. I want to be a better time manager, a better stress manager, a better friend, a better supporter of the people I care about. But significant growth is not something that occurs passively. If I want to improve myself, it starts with making a concerted effort, each and every day, to build towards a goal.
The best piece of advice I could give to an incoming senior is a concept that has floated around for years, which is eliminating Zero Days. Zero Days are days when we don’t make a single bit of progress towards our goals when we throw away 24 hours and come out of it feeling worse about ourselves. I would apply the concept of Zero Days very broadly; if you can limit your Zero Days when it comes to writing college apps, you’ll be dodging a very significant bullet of stress. But not every day has to be about college or academics, and on those days, I would focus on trying to improve myself in one specific way. It’s a tall order, but if we can limit the number of Zero Days in our personal development, whether it’s social, mental, emotional, or otherwise, those small increments of progress will compound and reward us greatly later on.
In the future, I hope to limit my Zero Days. I hope to take control of the wheel, and stop taking things for granted, because for as many things we can control in our lives, one thing we can’t do is go back in time and remedy feelings of regret.